Parmy Olson Forbes Staff I cover agitators and innovators in mobile. FOLLOW FORBES 9/30/2014 @ 12:55PM 122,847 views Finding Alibaba: How Jerry Yang Made The Most Lucrative Bet In Silicon Valley History This story appears in the October 20, 2014 issue of Forbes. Comment Now Follow Comments Yahoo's co-founder Jerry Yang at the office of his venture firm AME in Palo Alto, Calif. (Ethan Pines For Forbes) Jerry Yang’s Revenge - Forbes, 2014-10-20 Page 1 Jerry Yang is giving a quick tour of the conference room at his private investment firm in Palo Alto, Calif. It’s dotted with gifts and photos from his 20 years in Silicon Valley. Yahoo’s 45-year-old billionaire co-founder stops before a glass deal toy on a low table. “Um, I have no idea what that is.” He peers more closely, checks the date: September 2012. “That is… that was after I’d gone. I think that was the last deal I worked on at Yahoo.” The plaque commemorates what may have been one of the dumbest business decisions of all time. Yahoo’s board agreed to sell 523 million Alibaba shares, half of its stake, back to Alibaba at $13 apiece. Yang hadn’t been so keen to sell. They did anyway. By then he’d quit the board. Sure enough, Alibaba’s IPO last month rocked global markets. Shares of the Chinese e-commerce giant are now worth around $90. Yahoo still has a 16% stake worth $36 billion, but it left almost as much money on the table–some $35.5 billion–as its entire current market capitalization. Changing the subject, Yang spots a nearby photo: “Stanford! You know, I’m a Stanford kid through and through.” Where’s all the Yahoo memorabilia? Yang smiles. “We come here to go to work. It’s not a museum. I feel like this is a place to look forward and not look back too much.” Typical Jerry Yang: self-effacing and as cool as an engineering supernerd can be. When the official history of Silicon Valley is (re)written, it will be hard to judge which of Yang’s achievements is bigger: starting Yahoo or betting early on Jack Ma, chairman and CEO of Alibaba. Nine years ago, before Yang was CEO of Yahoo, he spent $1 billion of Yahoo’s money for 30% of Ma’s company. He knew the asset would be hugely valuable someday and refused to sell Yahoo to Microsoft when Steve Ballmer came calling in 2008, a decision that cost him his CEO job. Yahoo’s current CEO, Marissa Mayer, can do whatever she wants to put a better face on things, but Wall Street has marked her business down to zero. It’s now a proxy for Alibaba, and that was all Yang’s doing. Jerry Yang’s Revenge - Forbes, 2014-10-20 Page 2 “It’s not like I did anything,” he says, shrugging and tossing all the credit to Ma and his deputy, Joe Tsai. “They built the company. I didn’t.” But guess who’s getting a seat on Alibaba’s board post-IPO: nobody affiliated with Yahoo except Yang. His clear-eyed and early confidence in Alibaba has brought a whole new appreciation to his role as Silicon Valley’s new East-West power broker. Alibaba and a passel of Chinese, Korean and Japanese firms such as Baidu, Tencent, LINE, Naver and Rakuten are cranking up U.S. acquisition plans in commerce, messaging, gaming and search. Yang has deep ties in Asian tech circles and will be there to point Jack Ma and the others in the right direction. Earlier this year Tango, a messaging-app firm in Mountain View, Calif., took on $215 million from Alibaba at a $1 billion valuation, a deal that Yang helped along through his connections to Jack Ma’s deputy. Since leaving Yahoo, Yang has bankrolled more than 50 startups, including Evernote, Wattpad and Tango, through his investing firm, AME Cloud Ventures. (AME is pronounced “ah-meh” and means “rain” in Japanese, signifying Yang’s initial interest in cloud computing startups.) His new role of superangel offers a chance to shed his reputation as a bounced-out business mogul. Under his watch Yahoo steadily lost search and advertising share to Google. It also let Facebook slip through its fingers in 2006 by dithering over a $1 billion price tag. The only signs of his chapter with Yahoo today are a smattering of gray in his hair, the $2 billion in his bank account (he ranks 324th on The Forbes 400) and that neglected glass tombstone. “I wanted to get back to being close to entrepreneurs,” says Yang, sipping Taiwanese green tea and ignoring his smartphone for an hour straight. “I wanted to be able to do things at my own pace, make mistakes and nobody would care. People who observe me say I’m so much happier.” In many ways he’s more powerful as well. Jerry Yang’s Revenge - Forbes, 2014-10-20 Page 3 BORN IN TAIPEI, Taiwan, Yang was two when his father died from a pulmonary disease, leaving his mother, a professor of English and drama, to raise Yang and his brother. When it looked like Taiwan could be unified with mainland China in the late 1970s, she moved with her boys to San Jose when Yang was 10. Yang changed his first name from Chih-Yuan to Jerry. His grandmother and extended family around San Jose took care of him while his mother taught English to other immigrants. Yang’s own shaky English pushed him toward math and science through high school, which led him to building his first computer and then to a course in engineering at Stanford, where he jelled with Yahoo cofounder David Filo. In January 1994 they created Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web, an initially crude directory of links they renamed Yahoo several months later. Yahoo’s fortuitous connection with Alibaba would never have happened if a Japanese telecom billionaire named Masayoshi Son hadn’t made a detour to Mountain View in 1995 to sit down with the young Yang and Filo. Jerry Yang’s Revenge - Forbes, 2014-10-20 Page 4 His SoftBank had just bought Ziff Davis, the computer-focused publishing company, which was planning to put money into Yahoo but now couldn’t because of Son’s acquisition. Son was in a hotel room in Las Vegas when he asked his executive assistant, Masahiro Inoue, what he thought of Yang’s startup, according to Aiming High, a biography of Son. “An Internet company,” Inoue said. “I think it’s good.” The next day Son went to Mountain View and had take-out pizza and sodas with the young Yahoo founders. SoftBank invested $2 million for a 5% stake in Yahoo, putting in another $105 million in 1996 and then another $250 million in 1998 to take as much as 37% of the company at one point. Softbank founder Masayoshi Son (Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg) Yang was meanwhile getting stacks of proposals from Japanese companies wanting to build the first Web portal in Japan. About a month after Son’s initial investment Inoue went to visit Yang again. He’d failed to bring any documents for a formal proposal, so he just made his suggestion in person. “Let’s create Yahoo Japan,” he told Yang, according to the book. “We could start with two or three people and, if necessary, add more.” Jerry Yang’s Revenge - Forbes, 2014-10-20 Page 5 Yang liked that Inoue wanted to move quickly, and so the two shook hands. The following month Yahoo and SoftBank established their joint venture, Yahoo Japan, the country’s first real Web portal, and began operations the following April using Yahoo’s search engine. Inoue became its president. While Yahoo Japan began gaining millions of customers, Yang took his first trip to China in 1997. A junior staffer in the economic ministry was assigned to take Yang on a tour of the Great Wall of China. His name was Jack Ma, a former English teacher who had tried and failed to start a Chinese version of the Yellow Pages. “Jack was one of the first people I ever met [in China],” Yang says. Along the hike the two hit it off and talked about the growth of the Web. “He was very curious about what it’s like on the Internet and what the future might be.” Several months later Ma began building another startup based on grand and rather vague plans to connect Chinese companies with the rest of the world. He called it Alibaba. BY THE SPRING OF 1999, the height of the dot-com bubble, Yahoo had bloomed into one of the most popular websites on Earth, and Son was briefly almost as rich as Bill Gates. Ma’s Alibaba outfit was piddling by comparison, just a handful of people working out of his apartment in Hangzhou. But Son found him during his periodic hunts for new investments. After visiting Ma for the first time, Son recalled that he liked “the look in [Ma's] eye” and his “animal smell. It was the same when we invested in Yahoo, when they were still only five or six people.” Son put $20 million into Alibaba, before eventually amassing a 37% stake in the company, even as the dot-com crash wiped 99% off of SoftBank’s market cap and close to 90% of his net worth. Son and Yahoo survived the crash, if a bit dinged up.